A study of dialogue in Greek tragedy not as poetry in the first instance but as dialogue between the characters on stage. Which words do they highlight? What is the effect of this highlighting? The various chapters focus on sets of sentences that have similar meanings but different word order, so that the effects of word order can be teased out.
This book provides a thorough investigation of the expression of sentential negation in the history of Greek, based on extensive data from major stages of the language. It also provides a new semantic interpretation of Jespersen's cycle that explains the Greek developments and those in other languages.
What can oral poetic traditions teach us about language and the human mind? Oral Poetics has produced insights relevant not only for the study of traditional poetry, but also for our general understanding of language and cognition: formulaic style as a product of rehearsed improvisation, the thematic structuring of traditional narratives, or the poetic use of features from everyday speech, among many others. The cognitive sciences have developed frameworks that are crucial for research on oral poetics, such as construction grammar or conversation analysis. The key for connecting the two disciplines is their common focus on usage and performance. This collection of papers explores how some of the latest research on language and cognition can contribute to advances in oral studies. At the same time, it shows how research on verbal art in its natural, oral medium can lead to new insights in semantics, pragmatics, or multimodal communication. The ultimate goal is to pave the way towards a Cognitive Oral Poetics, a new interdisciplinary field for the study or oral poetry as a window to the mind.
This book presents the most comprehensive coverage of the field of Indo-European Linguistics in a century, focusing on the entire Indo-European family and treating each major branch and most minor languages. The collaborative work of 120 scholars from 22 countries, Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics combines the exhaustive coverage of an encyclopedia with the in-depth treatment of individual monographic studies.
In Classical Greek Syntax: Wackernagel's Law in Herodotus, David Goldstein offers the first theoretically-informed study of second-position clitics in Ancient Greek and challenges the long-standing belief that Greek word order is ‟free” or beyond the reach of systematic analysis. On the basis of Herodotus’ Histories, he demonstrates that there are in fact systematic correspondences between clause structure and meaning. Crucial to this new model of the Greek clause is Wackernagel’s Law, the generalization that enclitics and postpositives occur in ‟second position,” as these classes of words provide a stable anchor for analyzing sentence structure. The results of this work not only restore word order as an interpretive dimension of Greek texts, but also provide a framework for the investigation of other areas of syntax in Greek, as well as archaic Indo-European more broadly.
This volume proposes a multidisciplinary approach to the history of Ancient Greek. Each of its ten papers offers a methodological example of how the study of Greek can be greatly enhanced by a truly multidisciplinary perspective in which the analysis of language interacts with epigraphy, textual philology and comparative linguistics, yet without neglecting the role that linguistic features play in the texts in which they are used, and hence in the culture which produced both. The first four papers tackle epic language, addressing eccentric pronouns and formulas, the role and semantics of the middle perfect, and the development of hexameter poetry in the colonial West. The next two papers are devoted to lyric poetry and its linguistic influence in Greek literature and tackle fragments by Corinna and Epicharmus respectively. The remaining four contributions look into a variety of topics spanning from early Ionic prose to the diachronic development of the Greek lexicon and its reception in Byzantine lexicography. They all provide examples of how Greek literary language evolved across the centuries, how it was perceived by ancient scholars, and what contribution modern linguistic approaches can provide to our understanding of both these issues.
Long, stichomythic dialogues in the tragedies of Euripides are connected with some of the greatest problems of critical appreciation. The form is considered unnatural particularly when characters use stichomythia to tell stories to each other. In Shared Storytelling in Euripidean Stichomythia Liesbeth Schuren tries to rehabilitate Euripidean stichomythia, using pragmatic and narratological approaches. In the section devoted to pragmatic analysis, comparison between the turn-taking systems in Euripidean stichomythia and naturally occurring conversation establishes to what extent convention and realism are operative. Using narratological arguments, the traditional apparatus is expanded to suit the dialogic nature of narrative stichomythia. Analysis of narrative presentation in storytelling with two interlocutors results in a multi-faceted perspective, an effect unique to narrative stichomythia.
The volume assembles about 50 contributions presented at the Intenational Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics, held in Rome, March 2015. This Colloquium opened a new series of international conferences that has replaced previous national meetings on this subject. They embrace essential topics of Ancient Greek Linguistics with different theoretical and methodological approaches: particles and their functional uses; phonology; tense, aspect, modality; syntax and thematic roles; lexicon and onomastics; Greek and other languages; speech acts and pragmatics.
Central in this volume of the 6th International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics is the question how cohesion is created in Ancient Greek texts. The contributions to the volume either discuss the various cohesive devices that occur in a specific text or focus on the use and function of a particular cohesion device in a larger corpus. Apart from the use of pronomina and particles, less standard cohesive devices, like the use of tense and the grammatical form of complements, are taken into consideration. The result is a volume that gives a good impression of recent research in the field of Greek linguistics, not only of interest for classical scholars, but also for general linguists interested in discourse coherence cnd cohesion. Contributors include: Rutger J. Allan, Stéphanie J. Bakker, Louis Basset, Anna Bonifazi, Annemieke Drummen, Marietje (A.M.) van Erp Taalman Kip, Coulter H. George, Luuk Huitink, Sander Orriens, Annemieke van der Plaat, Antonio Revuelta, Albert Rijksbaron and Gerry C. Wakker.
